TDDC78 mid-term evaluation 2012

The course was mid-term-evaluated by the
muddy card method
before the break in the tenth lecture (after OpenMP and MPI advanced issues, by C.K.)
on wednesday 18/4/2012 (10:15-12:00).
27 students attended the lecture,
and I received 19 cards.
In the following I summarize those issues that were
raised by several students, and comment as appropriate.

Subject

Interesting topic/contents (4)

Should take up more general-purpose computing (1)Comment: The focus of TDDC78 on scientific computing is intentional,
as our course is also serving as a profile course for several
natural science and engineering programs,
and can be useful e.g. as preparation for thesis work in computational
science and engineering, such as computational physics, chemistry
and bioinformatics, which are important research fields
for Linköping university.
Note that we also offer a course in general purpose parallel (and GPU) programming in
autumn,
TDDD56 Multicore and GPU programming, which also has
a more general purpose parallel programming profile for the labs;
TDDD56 can be seen as a complement of TDDC78 (and vice versa).

OpenMP is useful even outside the course / HPC domain (1)

Lectures

Good / clear / interesting lectures (9)

Lectures should use more examples (2)
more whiteboard (1),
and assert that students really understand what is being said. (1)

There should be better synchronization between the different lecturers,
there was some repetition and confusion (1)

Some repetition in the lectures. (1)

Sometimes too detailed (1)

Dislike Fortran, would prefer only C/C++. (1)

Course material

Good/clear/informative lecture slide material (3)

An example of MPI_Scatterv would be nice (1)

Lesson(s)

Well done, informative and pedagogical lesson (3)

Could have more time to explain labs in more detail (1)

Labs

Good labs / labs are fun / relevant / interesting (7)

Somewhat difficult (2)

Hard to get started (1) / Needs more detailed instructions (1)

Supplied makefile of lab 1 / of pthreads lab did not work on Neolith (2)

Organization

Should give a recommendation how to distribute the labs (5 labs on 9 scheduled opportunities) (1)

Information about grading would be nice - how important is performance? (1)
Comment: Regarding the labs, ask your lab assistant.
Some practical hints on program optimization will be given early in the next lecture. -
Exam questions about parallel program design
are usually explicit about the expected quality of the solution (e.g., time-optimal)
and the points you still can get for a correct but inferior solution. See the demo exams
on the
example exams page.

Conclusion

By and large, the course seems to run very well.

I will try to make the remaining lectures more interactive.
Now that we have gone through the major programming environments
needed for the labs, we are less pressed by time.
Please note that you also can help and contribute:
please ask questions, also during lectures, and feel free to
interrupt me whenever I am too fast or not clear enough.